When I do that it doesn't set the title. I'm guessing that I don't fully understand how asWidget works right now. The GWT Api says "Widget adds support for receiving events from the browser and being added directly to panels." would I be right in thinking because setting titles is not related to " receiving events from the browser" that calling .asWidget().setTitle("****") has no affect? or is this something that occurs in GXT usage? Or is it just because I'm using comboFieldLabel as a Widget?

In my example myComboBoxExample.asWidget() returns comboFieldLabel as a Widget. I also tried setting the title inside myComboBoxExample of comboFieldLabel and this title could be retrieved by myComboBoxExample.asWidget().getTitle() but no set using myComboBoxExample.asWidget().setTitle()

/**
* Sets the title associated with this object. The title is the 'tool-tip'
* displayed to users when they hover over the object.
*
* @param title the object's new title
*/

Are you trying to set the html 'title' tooltip? In my brief testing, when setting the title of a combobox, it does indeed set a simple tooltip with that text.

No class in GXT overrides the behavior of either Widget.asWidget or UiObject.setTitle, so asWidget should always return 'this', and setTitle should always modify the title attribute of the dom element.

The purpose of the asWidget() method is to allow objects to implement IsWidget, so they can be added somewhere to the page, but to say no more about what they are made up of. This can be very useful in at least two ways:
* Testing - it is possible to have presenters that only know about a View interface, and that it implements IsWidget, and to pass that in turn to a HasOneWidget or AcceptsOneWidget (like the Activities/Places api does). This allows you to easily mock those interfaces, and run tests in a normal JVM
* Composition - instead of inheriting from some container or panel, and risking that some other user of your code rewrites the heading, or adds an additional button, you can simple implement IsWidget, and just return the actual root widget. As an example, if I am making a LoginPanel, I expect others to be able to add it to the page, to reset credentials and possibly listen for a LoginEvent or the like, but I don't expect others to add new buttons or rearrange the fields - if that is needed, then the LoginPanel class should be written for that.

The way I interpret what your saying is that the widget is like a generic UI interface (sort of like component but with more going on) and I find it very useful in that respect. I agree that its useful for setting up mocks, and I've been coding in a similar way to the examples provided and most of my ui classes implement Widget and Entrypoint to make things easy to mock.

The issue about setting the title is not a blocker for me, but going back and checking my code, I can see in this particular instance of code I cannot set the tool tip unless its done inside the asWidget method. (I can post more code if you would like to see it). In the following example I set the title inside the asWidget() method